I gave up with the Compaq PII PC, I have been trying to install Vista on another machine:

Dell Optiplex GX1

Pentium III 500MHz, 256MB RAM, previous OS- RedHat 9.0

I get a different error message whilst booting from the Vista DVD.

A ‘Windows Boot Manager’ screen appears with some text saying.

“Status: 0xc0140019

Info: Windows failed to load because the ACPI firmware (BIOS) RSDP Table is invalid”

I did a search on google for the status number and found this.

Windows Vista does not support Compaq Presario BIOS - MSDN Forums

Last test would be installing Windows XP Pro SP2 and see if Vista can be installed on top of WinXP Pro. If this does not work, then I will have to install Vista on another Dell machine.

Ray